Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday September 10, 2007 @07:34AM
from the get-your-conspiracy-theories-warmed-up dept.

Petrushka writes "In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organization has paid off any other organization for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms leveled against the idea of governments standardizing on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support."

wtf.. it's nothing to do with being a superior application, it's to do with it being bundled with machines by default and then everyone being locked in because the file format is pretty much closed. When it comes to jpegs and the like, any viewer works. When it comes to text files, any viewer works. When it comes to files with *shock horror* text with different sizes, colours and styles, everyone seems to want or expect word. The only thing that I think makes Office stand out is Outlook, which I find is a p

I don't even know if I want to read the rest of your post. When did I say bundled with Windows? I said machines. I know it's not always there by default, but it is the only option you get for buying an office application suite with a Dell PC for example. IMO it is dominant for the same reason that Windows is dominant, but I've always been happy to edit text documents using whatever I have to hand (Wordpad is fine for me, and I wrote a 13000 word essay on whatever version of Word that came with Windows 3.1 a

I'm not sure why I'm replying:) but actually Word has always had some pretty nice features. Most recently comments and annotations are amongst them, along with versioning features. People I work with use them all the time for collaboration.I remember when people were saying "people don't need Word" when the big feature was tables.. which are obviously a very handy feature people use all the time, once they know about them. It just takes a while for the new features to percolate, and then you can't live wit

Teh FOSSies just don't get it. MS isn't the most accepted office app because of their standard. The end user barely even thinks about the file size. MS won for two reasons: first, because it was a superior application

Perhaps you could detail for us what precisely *is* superior about Office Apps?

You can hardly call it a standard when only one company controls it and it's not consistent with itself over time. Users really do hate that kind of thing and OOXML is never going to gain real use. Nine months after the release of Vista, ODF is still more used. M$'s made a huge blunder trying to pretend they are all the good things free software is while pushing a massive forced format change over. They have given all of their customers a reason to shop and recommended their competitors - that is, anyon

Still, it's a welcome sight to see IBM participating in OOo development. OOo just keeps improving with every new release, and I find that I use it more than Microsoft Office, although I have both installed at work and at home.

That is a fair and accurate point to make. I do see a lot of value to this move, however, beyond just improving accessibility for Windows users. On the one hand, this may make accessibility more cross-platform, so it will be easier to migrate from one OS to another; with OO.org already cross-platform, mak

I do see a lot of value to this move, however, beyond just improving accessibility for Windows users. On the one hand, this may make accessibility more cross-platform, so it will be easier to migrate from one OS to another; with OO.org already cross-platform,

Application level quirks like this are a symptom of non free software disease that should not be imitated. If Windoze had decent accessibility built into their OS, this would not be an issue. They don't so every application developer has to reinve

While you might make a solid point there (I don't really follow assistive technologies much), you're missing an important, more pragmatic point: The (perceived?) cost of migration.

Imagine I'm Joe CTO. If I just change my users from MS Office to OpenOffice, I have to handle transitioning just one piece of software (albeit a big one). Last thing I want is to change both office suite and operating system in one go. So I need Open Office with all the bells and whistles *now*, and once that transition is compl

It is terribly slow. Looks like a huge piece of bloat. It will be great if it can be faster.

When was the last time you used OOo? Since 2.0, it's not that slow. It's slow in initial loading, but that's because OOo loads the whole suite when starting any of its components, so comparing load time of OOo Writer vs. Word, for example, is not an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Once OOo is loaded, though, it responds very quickly on any fairly decent hardware -- at least like a 1.5 Ghz processor and have a gig of RAM depending on OS.

When was the last time you used OOo? Since 2.0, it's not that slow. It's slow in initial loading, but that's because OOo loads the whole suite when starting any of its components, so comparing load time of OOo Writer vs. Word, for example, is not an apples-to-oranges comparison.

I use 2.0 and I find it slower than Word. I did not know that when I loaded OOo writer it also loaded all the rest of the suite but why waste time doing that at all? Normally I open office by clicking on a document which I want to open, in which case I do not want it to waste time with alot of features that are not relevant to the document type I have just opened.

I would bet that this is why it is always accused of being slower thet MS Word and this is one of the reasons I would have a hard time convincing

But there's a taskbar widget for OpenOffice.org that can do the same stuff if you want to get the same startup speed and you don't mind wasting a lot of RAM.

The answer to this depends on where I am. Currently I am at work so I find this feature bloody useful as I use office alot and open a large number of different documents to view the contents or make small edits. When I am at home I would find this more annoying though as I spend less time opening Office documents.

You do have a choice in windows as well, though it is a bit more hidden... I have a tendency to nuke most of my startup apps in windows, because I don't like, often use, or need most of them... It just depends on your usage... it's like those stupid printer notification icons... "zOMG! you are low on yellow ink, prepare to die!" that it can't just tell me when it tries to print next time.

What I really wish, is that the startup assistant/tray icon was an optional choice, clearly marked on a separate pane

How did this get modded informative? That doesn't happen at all, and you can take that from someone who just installed Office 2003. There's no trace of a service or process related to Office, and physical memory usage is the same as it was before.

But only if Office Startup Assistant is off, and on my version of 2003 it's not even started by default. Emphasising:

Can I Remove the Osa.exe File? You can safely remove the Osa.exe file without causing the Office XP programs to fail. However, if you remove Osa.exe, you no longer benefit from the performance advantages that are provided by running Osa.exe

This is a long way away from the "Office does this by default and can't be turned off" behaviour that some of the posts around here are claiming, though I will concede that Office XP behaviour and 2003 behaviour seems to vary.

Which is why, periodically, one dreams of one of the older programs (WordStar, XYWrite, Word5.1) being released and updated just enough to run correctly on modern OSes. A single app, encompassing a core functionality, that doesn't completely overwhelm a modern computer. Comparitively Emacs/TeX is a lightweight, responsive, document-processing system compared to Word/OO/Pages, etc, and when you've reached the, "I run Emacs because it's so small and quick" stage, it's time to take a hard look at your produc

The minimum JDK/JRE version required to use OpenOffice.org features that require java is JDK/JRE version 1.3.1....
For full functionality, jdk/jre 1.4.0_02 or newer or jdk/jre 1.4.1_01 or newer is required

Certain features you might or might not want require Java but it is fully possible to install (compile) and run the rest of the office suite without Java. I'm sure because I compiled it just a few months ago without Java on my system (although at this point I have installed Java).

Well, if they abandoned it, I'm sure all three existing users would notice.

Smartsuite is installed on all corporate IBM PCs but the option to install Office is the first thing in the global software repository, and it generally has to be used to share documents with clients. Sun have similar issues but at least StarOffice can talk.doc.

Aye -- IBM has apparently abandoned SmartSuit -- they don't plan on even making a Vista-compatible version, from what I hear. Trust me, I know -- it's what we use in my shop, and we're in a awful mess right now because there's so many spreadsheets flying around in SmartSuite's (unfortunately) proprietary format.

If they're abandoning it, it's a pity as AmiPro/WordPro/WhateverItIsThisMonthPro was a nice alternative wordprocessor a few years back. I had been told unofficially by an IBMer once that they had an internal port to Unix started, but vehement managment opposition to it ever seeing the light of day. I'd kind of hoped they'd treat it like DataExplorer [opendx.org], and let it fly free. (They would be encouraged to keep Notes down on the farm, preferably muzzled and in a cage.

Any time you need interface contributions from Lotus Freaking Notes, something is badly wrong.

I'm curious about the accessibility support for that helpful feature it has, where entering the password characters puts up random numbers of bullets while hieroglyphics blink randomly around the input box, apparently to distract and confuse shoulder surfers. Do they have a similar function for blind users? And how about sighted users and blind shoulder surfers? Shouldn't it make random annoying noises as well, to confuse them?

It gets even better than that. Ever tried using Notes on a Mac? Version 6 was the retarded little brother of the Notes family. Thankfully with version 7 they've managed to put him into a nice suit, but he still acts funny and drools all over himself...

I've used and programmed Lotus Notes on and off for the past 10 years. It's not that bad for what it does. For a networked environment the database replication was way ahead of it's time, and it still has no real competitor in that field. OK, so the field has moved on; and the interface is shit. Still, admin wise it's pretty good, and IBM has done a lot of good work with Notes.

We've rolled out a wiki in the same breath as running a huge Notes infrastructure. What I don't understand is that, as crap as the Notes interface is, it's still way ahead of any browser for editing documents. Anyway, so the Notes database is the back-end, and the web-browser is the new client. Call it a wiki, and people love it. Call it Notes database and they'll run a mile. I suppose it must say something about the whole thing.

I'm not defending Lotus Notes in general, but in this particular case you're wrong. I had to work extensively with Lotus Notes many years ago, and the reason for the hieroglyphs was NOT to confuse shoulder surfers, as you seem to believe.It used to take quite a while to authenticate when using a modem (you know, the 56kbps stuff and earlier). The hieroglyphs were there as a visual clue that you had entered your password correctly, BEFORE you even attempted to authenticate. The same password always produced

I appreciate the correction -- I'd been mystified as to why the blinking hieroglyphics where there are at all, and when I read the Hall of Shame page, figured that must be the explanation.

It still seems like an annoying solution to a complete non-issue, or at least something that would be an non-issue if it weren't for the even more annoying random number of bullets per password character. (Does that also have some utility I'm not noticing?) I'm more than old enough to remember modems and don't recall lengt

I'm curious about the accessibility support for that helpful feature it has, where entering the password characters puts up random numbers of bullets while hieroglyphics blink randomly around the input box, apparently to distract and confuse shoulder surfers.

I'm curious as to what qualifies you to talk about this when you haven't even observed the application's behaviour correctly.

The hieroglyphs act as a checksum of the entered password. So I know that when I enter my pw correctly, the last char to display

I do think some hatred of Lotus Notes is misplaced. Yes, it does feel a bit bloated, and there are a few "odd" behaviors in the user interface, but overall, it's a usable groupware/email program that provides all the little bells and whistles (ie, heavily integrated calendar and scheduling and such) that corporate users want, and even has a LINUX client now. That's cool IMHO. I just wish we had a good open source competitor. You can setup a

The folks who use Linux are almost never the folks who choose and maintain Lotus. Usually you get some CEx who had a very informative meeting with IBM's sales reps at the most expensive restaurant(read:stripclub) in town, who decides that Lotus Notes will be the new company standard, and leaves it to some Windows admin with 2 years experience to actually implement it.

35 American developers is a big investment in terms of money. 35 Chinese developers, is a signficantly smaller investment in terms of money. In skill, ideally, the investment would be the same though. Obviously the OP was talking about the financial investment, not the skills IBM is investing into OOo.

Focused companies can have a senior executive order their devs to get something Out The Door. Apple at its best the last few years has done this. Microsoft DID do this for 8 years from 1993-2001 until their code imploded for Vista.Open Source projects with good leadership can deliver efficiently with a "soft" approach. I think Mozilla has done some great work. But when a "Bazaar" project splinters too much, then Open Source loses its advantage.

This reminds me of an issue we have at work. At work, we run OpenOffice now, it gave us flexibility and yet fully functional... except for one guy, the Editor. He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him, or we can't read his documents, yet it's our fault because we won't pay for Office '07 when everyone else is happy with Open Office.

I know this guy, he just went home, installed it, looked, went "this doesn't look like Office 07" and left it at that. Until we can woo this kind of person, however, I fear that OO, and any open standard wp for that matter, will never truely break into mainstream, because he is the Editor, in charge of a whole department.

This reminds me of an issue we have at work. At work, we run OpenOffice now, it gave us flexibility and yet fully functional... except for one guy, the Editor. He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him,

IIRC Sun brought out an addon for MS Office which enables it to read OASIS formats.

We "wooed" employees by saying, "this is our new company policy. all computers will be changed over to this new standard effective XXXX" 95% had no problem, the 5% that did whined big time. but we had finance on our side so in the big shirts meetings when the whiners whines got to them they got shot down by the director of finance saying, "It will cost us $180,000 to switch back to MS office, replacing that employee with someone that is professional enough to understand business means change is not only cheaper but probably a good idea anyways."

It shut all the whiners up fast when they found that replacing them is far cheaper than catering to their whining.

You unfortunately have a high level whiner. so you need to have even higher than him do the smackdown.

It's really easy to do this. You simply do their footwork and show them the Costs. If they have a real number in hand the finance guys eat it up like it's free pizza.finance guys run the business contrary to what the Operations executives think. They can not do anything unless finance releases the cash. Finance loves It that saves money and if you show a good savings with minimal change expense, you become the golden child for that moment.

...you took OO.o as it stands now, rebranded it "Microsoft Office 2009 Preview" (just the splash screen, title bar and help text should be adequate) and showed it to someone who'd made such a complaint. Tell them that "Microsoft found people were confused by the change of interface in 2007 so they changed it back again to something which looks more like Office 2000" or other such bull.

I bet most of the complainers would announce themselves to be perfectly happy with this, and far prefer it to OpenOffice.

In short, It works. You don't have to change anything just say it's "A new version of Office" and few people notice. The reason is that 90% of users, the only feature they use is _maybe_ change the font or font size. And File->new and File->save. That's about it for most users.

He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him, or we can't read his documents, yet it's our fault because we won't pay for Office '07 when everyone else is happy with Open Office.

A plausible alternative theory is that OOo does suck, but your Editor is the only person who needs certain features or communicates with certain other parties that demonstrate this.

In most office environments, the cost of paying for business software is a negligible expense relative to the money saved or wasted by making a poor choice of which software to use. My employer probably spends several times more money on employing me for a single day than they do on whatever blanket MS Office licence they hav

For a Windows user, Office 2007 is quite different from previous versions. If you compare it to the Mac version of Word, it will be much more intuitive . I've always preferred the Mac versions of Microsoft Office apps until 2007 for Windows. I had to use it this summer for a class and I found it to be very nice. It does have a learning curve and you could argue that if you wanted to adopt Open Office. I get sick of the praise for OO just because it's FOSS. I've tried to like it for users. From an end

It was all good until I read :
"....they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies..."
Lotus Notes is EVIL and must be killed, -- I forgive you Outlook & Exchange....,

Having used lotus notes while on assignment at IBM I can attest to it's evilness and lack of "straightforwardness." It's a bitch to setup without an IT support dude sitting at your... wait a tick... IBM makes money out of service contracts? No way...

Notes can be a git to use, takes a lot of getting used to... but it is WAY better than Outlook & Exchange, Organising meetings is easier, the replication features make it easy to work "off-line" on a laptop then sync up your changes when you get into the office.

Once you are used to the user interface and have learned a bit about the power of notes, it makes Outlook look like a childs toy.

This may actually cause the first "black hole" scenario for software. Notes combined with OpenOffice may actually be so bloated that the code will collapse in on itself and suck all surrounding code into it. When you try to open the application everything seems to slow down as you get closer and closer to actually running the program; as if time almost stops when you're at the verge of finally looking at a document.

As am I, but I read about it in a trade mag from the time, wish I still had it...

So, at the risk of losing my karma for being way off-topic...

From what I read/recall, basically, a PSTN trunk router overloaded and shut down, forwarding its circuits to another trunk router, which overloaded and shut down, etc, until, basically (because the Baby Bells (read: AT&T) still ran the entire phone system at the long-distance level) no long distance calls could be made. The trade mag I read had a few lines of

It's also worth pointing out here that the upcoming version of IBM's Lotus Notes product includes internal support for ODF documents (.odt,.ods and.odp). Based on what I see in the beta, it looks to me like the ODF support is provided by an embedded and tweaked version of OOo, but I think it's still worth adding Lotus Notes to the list of apps that support ODF.

Notes 8 is built on the Eclipse RCP, BTW, and runs nicely on Linux (which is my platform of choice) as well as Windows and OS X. I imagine it can run just about anywhere Java does. To be honest, I don't think the new version is hugely better than previous versions, and I've never been a big fan of Notes, but for Linux users whose companies use Notes it's really nice to have a native client rather than mucking about with Notes under WINE, or running a Windows OS on another box or in a VM. As an OOo user, it's also very nice to know that I'll soon be able to send ODF documents to my colleagues secure in the knowledge that they can read them.

Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but I'm not a spokesman for IBM. IBM is happy about that state of affairs, and so am I.

The correct way would be to promote "choice" for customers by offering yet another standard and bribe countries like Azerbaijan, Loolooistan, and Iamsodumbistan to make it an ISO standard. It should offer features like "Page break as in Lotus Notes Style" or "autospace like in IBM370/155 JCL//job card punch format" that no body else can offer. Howzthat for product differentiation? Instead is joining OO.org. How sad, the business acumen is so lacking in the Internation BUSINESS Machines!

If IBM (and sun) really want to make a dent in Office, they should work on MsPM and Visio clones. In particular, if they first do the file format library (open, read, write close files), then it allows other OSS projects to move forward. Then followed up with clones/improvements. By doing these 2, they pretty much remove one of the large blocks to corporate adoption.

For most companies, MS Project is "too high end" in the sense that they only use a fraction of the capabilities of Project. Of course it's not enough for large scale project management, but most places I've seen Project used it's been used to "draw" a GANTT chart, rather than as a real project management application.

It is fine to have differing programs, rather than clones. But they MUST be able to open, read AND write to the MS format. Otherwise, nobody wants to shift. A good example was a neighbor was on Apple works. I tried for 3 years to move him off of Apple works. His number 1 gripe was no way to get all of his works files into office and back to works. But his system died (hard disk failure), and when he bought a nice new mac OSX system, he made the jump, and slowly moved his new files over. And this was for a r

This is pretty cool.
I was working with an engineer from IBM who had a Linux laptop setup by IBM for his work computer.
It used OOo, as well as a Linux version of Lotus notes. (I know many of you hate Notes, but like the Mainframe, it'll be around forever b/c my company runs many critical apps off of Lotus notes databases)
He also had working VPN (I think it was IBM's connectivity software), so he could connect back to his office LAN from my office.
I was very impressed. He said that many of the eng

Lotus Notes 8 is included in the image and it's much better since it is almost a complete rewrite (uses Eclipe and OO I think). The VPN is most likely Lotus Mobile Connect (http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=3183&uid=swg24013528). They are bundled with the Open c4eb that IBM uses internally (based on RH). There are also available for other dists used internally (namely Debian).

Notes also comes in a Mac OS X variety, which is currently open in another window. It's pretty good. It's a pity they couldn't improve the email interface, even the gmail interface is better... meh, it's corporate software what do I expect?

IBM should release Lotus 1-2-3 as open source. It was once the de facto industry standard and there plenty of people who remember it. It is one of the most well-documented application programs ever, and its @ functions are still cloned to this day. It ran on all platforms from DOS to Windows to UNIX. The WKx (WK4, WK3, etc) file format is very well documented and an industry standard. I'm not sure IBM even remembers they own 1-2-3's source, since they got it with their purchase of Lotus to get the groupware

Is important that Open Office keeps getting improved and all the help from IBM is welcomed. At some point (if not already there), the dominant MS Office will have to make a revolutionary step in order to justify the price tag.

Users will look at the quality/price ratio although a bit difficult if you have to divide by zero for Open Office:)

You're reading my mind. That's the first thing I thought when I read that IBM was on-board.

I used to use Word Pro ever since it was AmiPro for Windows 3.1. OpenOffice replaced Word Pro a few years ago, but I still have a lot of legacy documents that I need to access every now and then. So, when I rebuild a PC I install Word Pro just in case. (It's only about 70 MB for Word Pro 9.8, so it's not like it's a burden on my 160 GB boot drive.) Having an LWP filter for OpenOffice would be fantastic!